Editorial
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
It’s so easy to mistake consistent output for sustainable performance. Employees meet deadlines, hit targets and even deliver the results you need. But underneath, many are running on fumes. When people maintain performance while depleted for a sustained period of time, the consequences are significant.
I’ve coined a term for this phenomenon: “loan-sharking your mind and body.” You are essentially borrowing energy now at the cost of future performance and health. Understanding the hidden costs of overextending yourself, your team or organization for periods of time is essential — because too often, the realization comes too late.
Loan-Sharking: Performing at a Cost
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Think of energy as a bank account. Every day, we deposit and withdraw mental, emotional and physical energy. Performing without enough energy is like taking a loan from that account, but not just any loan — it’s a high-interest loan, much like a loan shark would offer. And, just as with a loan shark, it gets you through the moment, but the interest compounds fast and it’s not sustainable. Eventually, the borrowing stops.
When leaders and employees push through exhaustion, they may appear productive. But debt-financed productivity comes at a steep cost. Pushing through without enough energy forces the brain into short-term survival strategies. That works briefly, but it drains reserves and increases the cost for your body and mind over time.
Overextension affects more than just immediate output — it gradually undermines the systems that support long-term performance, creativity and problem-solving.
The Hidden Health Costs
Loan-sharking your energy creates fatigue and irritability in the short-term, but it also affects health and cognitive function in the long-term. When energy reserves are sufficient, it can perform critical regulatory functions: managing emotions, controlling stress hormones like cortisol and allowing recovery. When energy is low, the body’s survival systems dominate, and the systems that protect long-term health are suppressed. This increases the risk of illness, disease and chronic stress-related conditions. Low energy brain = reduced brain function.
The Role of Mindset
It’s not just physical energy that matters. Mental energy plays a huge role in sustaining performance. Internal narratives can either fuel or further deplete energy. In her book "Sovereign," Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., Yale School of Management Faculty and Author, writes: “Most of us identify with what’s going on inside our head. We take it to be truth. And yet, often, it’s not. Especially when it makes us feel small, afraid, less than … Then it’s usually a lie. That’s a good thing to remember.”
Employees who internalize self-doubt or negative narratives are essentially adding mental debt. This mental load compounds energy depletion, making “loan-sharking” even more dangerous. Leaders need to recognize that sustainable performance is as much about mindset and emotional energy as it is about hours logged or tasks completed.
Sovereignty and Sustainable Performance
So, what’s the alternative? Seppälä offers a framework in "Sovereign" grounded in reclaiming your sovereignty, which she describes as “internal freedom and a relationship with yourself so profoundly life‑supportive and energizing that it allows you to access your fullest potential.”
The framework includes several elements, which Seppälä explains as:
- Sovereign Self: Reclaiming your right to exist as you (including from yourself).
- Sovereign Emotions: Learning to navigate emotions with grace.
- Sovereign Mind: Releasing the mental imprints that don’t serve you well and building high-quality imprints that feed your sovereignty.
- Sovereign Relationships: Having a relationship with oneself and others that is deeply life-supportive.
- Sovereign Intuition: Allowing yourself to make informed choices based on all the information you gather and process, both with reason and with intuition.
- Sovereign Body: Deeply respecting the body and making it your closest friend and ally.
Sovereignty isn’t a feel-good concept, it’s practical. Leaders and employees who cultivate it are not just surviving; they are performing at their highest levels without incurring a debt on their mind or body.
In their HBR article, "The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy," Seppälä and researcher Kim Cameron report that after empirically examining successful leadership, they found that, “The greatest predictor of success for leaders is not their charisma, influence or power. It is not personality, attractiveness or innovative genius. The one thing that supersedes all these factors is positive relational energy: the energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse and renew them.”
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By investing in energy, mindset and recovery, organizations allow employees to operate in a debt-free mode, where they are mentally cash-flow positive, and where true sustainable performance becomes possible. This isn’t just good for health — it’s good for creativity, innovation and resilience, and quite literally all of the major people-focused objectives organizations wish for. And it has measurable impacts on the bottom line. Seppälä and Cameron state that, “In organizations, superior shareholder returns occur, and in some of our studies, outcomes exceeded industry averages in profitability and productivity by a factor of four or more.”
How to Start Stopping Loan-Sharking
- Prioritize and role-model recovery: Encourage real opportunities to recharge and recognize that renewal looks different for different people. No, this isn’t just about offering the occasional well-being day off (although those are lovely). It’s about making recovery part of performance itself, embedding it into how you work and not treating it as a treat after exhaustion.
- Think holistically: Provide resources and practical tools to manage stress, burnout and the internal narratives that shape how people experience their work. Address the whole human, not just one fragment. You can’t fix a single piece of the puzzle and expect a complete, coherent picture at the end. Sustainable performance requires a whole-system approach. You may well be providing a plethora of tools and resources designed to support performance and well-being — but are they truly changing how someone shows up each day? Are they influencing how they think, respond and navigate challenges in the moments that matter?
- Measure energy, not just output: Accurately measuring human energy, both the inputs that fuel it and the outputs it drives, does two critical things. At an organizational level, it provides a clear view of true human capacity. At an individual level, it helps employees understand their own energy dynamics and the factors that may be limiting their performance and effectiveness.
- Promote autonomy: Giving employees greater control over how they manage their work helps protect energy and sustain motivation. And yes, even within significant constraints, it is possible to support agency. Autonomy isn’t about removing all limits. It’s about identifying what choices are available within the reality you’re operating in. When people have clarity on what is within their control, they conserve energy, increase ownership and engage more sustainably.
- Model sovereignty as a leader: Leaders who are aware of the mental stories that don’t serve them and who practice self-compassion set the tone for their teams. But sovereignty also shows up in how you support the systems you introduce. Don’t simply drop tools and frameworks onto employees and expect transformation. Be part of their success. Actively engage with them, reference them, normalize them. Giving people a tool is one thing. Giving them permission through your behavior to use it is another. When leaders embody the practices they promote, sovereignty becomes cultural, not just individual.
Final Thought
Loan-sharking your mind and body might keep you performing today, but it comes at a high cost tomorrow. The sustainable path to excellence isn’t just hard work or pushing beyond capacity, it’s building energy reserves, a sovereign mindset, and respect for the body and brain that make performance possible in the first place.
When it seems that output is often valued over well-being, recognizing the hidden debt of depleted performance is not a soft leadership move, it’s a necessary one. And it's one that pays dividends for years to come. Output and well-being do not need to sit in first and second place, competing for priority. They belong on the same line. In fact, they must be. If we expect individuals and organizations to continue performing as complexity and stressors increase — and they will — then this isn’t optional. It’s the strategy that makes sustained performance possible.
Editor's Note: How else can businesses support workers at a time of increasing complexity and stress?
- 4 Steps to Support Employees Through Organizational Change — All transformations should be accompanied by formal change management plans that are human-centered and anchored in how the human mind works.
- Build Organizational Resilience to Thrive in an Uncertain World — Now is the time for leaders to ask: Are we building a five-year business or a hundred-year business? The future belongs to those who choose resilience.
- Redefine the Psychological Contract to Improve Engagement and Productivity — The psychological contract is as important to the employer-employee relationship as the formal one outlining the terms of work. It's time to revisit yours.
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